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The following represent four essential components of a responsible monitoring center:
These components help a monitoring center maintain the best possible customer service while ensuring consistent signal processing for the safety and wellbeing of your customer's lives and property.
If you think about it, your monitoring center's operators are one of the most customer facing components of your business. They are the ones who speak directly with your customers, who make them feel protected and safe. Having highly trained operators with specific traits like empathy and compassion makes all the difference in the world, not only to the monitoring center, but for the comfort and peace of mind of your customers. With years of experience, AG has refined our hiring process to produce award winning operators who provide the absolute best care and service to your customers.
Continued learning is another important part of the AG culture. As part of this effort, all AG operators are audited by our quality assurance team on a weekly basis to ensure our operators are providing superior service to your customers 24/7.
AG trainers play a large roll in teaching AG operators our principles and core values. They receive ongoing professional training and education to better understand adult learning styles and incorporate applicable techniques into their teaching. In 2021, all our trainers were taken through professional development workshops that helped them develop their facilitation skills in the classroom. This continued education throughout our operations department shows our commitment to supporting our employees with continuous training and empowering them to be come leaders while providing our customers with the best individuals to keep your customers safe.
Culture will make or break any business in any industry. At AvantGuard, our “We Care F.I.R.S.T.” culture is the very essence of our corporate identity.
AG employees genuinely care about the success of your business, the well being of your subscribers, and the happiness of each member of the AG family. Your subscribers recognize this in every interaction with us. If employees of a monitoring center don' enjoy their work, it shows up in customer engagement and productivity. According to a Gallup survey, highly engaged employees show 21% greater profitability. This is one of the reasons why AG is so focused on our responsibility to create a culture where our team members enjoy themselves at work.
Time and technology move fast. Is a business being responsible if it’s not looking to innovate and improve? Without new innovations, employee performance slips and service levels drop. And if service suffers, customer trust and satisfaction may falter as well. Consequently, at AG we take seriously our responsibility to create an extraordinary corporate culture for the overall happiness of our team. And that makes all the difference in creating a responsible monitoring center.
For a continent-wide subscriber base, hot redundancy is really the only model for a truly responsible monitoring center.
AvantGuard leverages eight redundant monitoring centers. All phone lines and internet traffic automatically failover to another facility if any issues are detected on the primary path. Within each monitoring center, all critical equipment is configured in high-availability status, meaning the failure of one element of hardware has no impact on the operation of the center due to the twin piece of equipment that continues to function until the failed unit can be brought back online.
We regularly test our redundancy and fail-over through planned tests as well as with monthly system patches and updates. The combination of these specific planned tests and ongoing system maintenance allows us to validate our redundancy in a controlled environment. From these tests we learn whether all failover operates as expected, and if not, it provides us a safe environment to examine the unexpected behavior and determine the cause.
Redundancy and automation are closely tied together in some aspects. Immediate failover ensures that in the event a central station goes down, let’s say from a natural disaster, automations will immediately switch over the signal path to another central station without human interaction.
Automation also takes place on the operator side in the form of reliable action plans. These scripts make it possible for AG operators to provide planned, consistent responses to customers in all situations. It removes the guesswork and enables our operators to perform their tasks in potentially stressful emergency situations as quickly and effectively as possible.
AG goes to great lengths to ensure you and your customers enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing lives and property are safe. It’s what a responsible monitoring center does.
For more information, please feel free to contact us.
